.NET Rocks!

Do you understand how to develop software with GitHub? Carl and Richard walk through the fundamentals of GitHub with Bill Wagner. Bill walks through the key differences between the distributed source control that is GitHub versus the more classic central control style source control systems. Often it is harder for experienced developers to deal with the reality of GitHub than someone new to source control! The conversation explores all the concepts of GitHub - repositories, cloning, forking, push and pull requests, merging and rebasing. There's a lot to know, but there are great tools for getting started. And at the end, a quick discussion about Humanitarian Toolbox and their awesome open source projects to help save lives - you can help!

Ci with SQL Server? Are you crazy? Carl and Richard talk to Ike Ellis about what it takes to get databases changes happening as smoothly as application changes. Really! Ike talks about the concept of database lifecycle management and how it is orthogonal to application lifecycle management. The tricky bit is managing the data! And to help with that, Ike discusses a great tool chain of source code management, testing and deployment tools that work with databases like SQL Server and integrate into your usual development lifecycle toolchain as well. This is some next level DevOps thinking!

Unifying your Git GUI experience! Carl and Richard talk to Amy Palamountain from GitHub about how GitHub Desktop is bringing together the separate GitHub for Mac and GitHub for Windows products. Amy explains that in the past, there were separate GUI clients for Mac and Windows, with separate feature sets and styles. Bringing the codebase together keeps the releases more consistent, but it also represents an interesting unified coding approach using technologies like Reactive Extensions and other cross-platform tooling. Check it out!

Ready for a GitHub Extension for Visual Studio 2015? Phil Haack is back and talking smack about the cool code being build at GitHub. The announcement about the product was made at Build, but this show dives deeper into the technology involved. This new tool goes well beyond Git integration, diving deeper into the social media aspects of GitHub and making it easier for cross-platform teams to collaborate at GitHub. You need Visual Studio 2015 to take advantage of this, but that's pretty easy to get - try it out!

So when do IT Pros become developers? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Evans about his operations folks writing code and dealing with all the challenges that everyone finds when they write, own and operate code. The code in question is primarily PowerShell, used to automate deployment. It needs testing, source control and everything else that code requires. Steve talks about how his operations folks have come to learn the same things that all developers need to learn, and for the most part, end up using the same tools. PowerShell may have its own IDE, but more than ever the IT Pros want to use Visual Studio for its richness of tools and integration with resources that they realize they need. Now all we have to do is convince Microsoft that just because you operate systems doesn't mean you don't program!

Carl and Richard talk to Greg Shackles about making continuous deployment work in the mobile apps space. The conversation starts out with the projects that Greg is currently working on, and the need to get them deployed routinely to iOS and Android devices - this means, of course, deployment to the AppStore, which only goes so fast. Greg talks about avoiding the AppStores by finding ways to make changes internally, rather than a full deploy. The discussion goes down his preferred toolchain and inserting as much automation as possible - not so much for speed as for repeatability! Check out Greg's talks and slides in the show notes on this subject.

Carl and Richard talk to Brian Randell about the latest on Visual Studio Online (VSO). As Brian explains, this isn't about putting Visual Studio itself into the cloud, but rather surrounding your copy of Visual Studio with services in the cloud that make development easier. The conversation goes down the list, starting with source control in general and TFS specifically. One huge advantage of VSO - you don't have to deploy TFS yourself! Beyond source control and task management there are deployment tools and testing, all of which can be run in the cloud, where you're only billed for what you use. This is modern development at it's finest!

While at the Belfast stop of the .NET Rocks Ireland Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to the one-and-only Martin Woodward! Martin discusses the state of Team Foundation Server today and source control in general. The conversation ranges over the evolution of source control, the effects of the internet on creating distributed version control and how Git, SVC, HG and many other version control systems all get along. Great thinking from a guy who's spent years deeply immersed in source control!

Carl and Richard talk to Cory Fowler from Microsoft about how developers can put together a continuous delivery solution on Azure. The conversation starts out with a discussion about the core concepts of continuous delivery - integrating build and testing together with lots of automation to create a minimum number of manual steps as possible. Cory describes how Azure becomes the environment for development, QA and production, and how the MSDN subscription can help at each step of the way. Lots of tools are discussed, there are many ways to get to this level of automation.

Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his latest work at GitHub. The conversation starts out talking about semantic versioning, just trying to establish a coherent set of documents about how versioning should work. Phil then talks about licensing around GitHub, discussing a new service at GitHub to make it easier to select a software license - running down the differences between MIT, Apache and GPL licenses, and more! The discussion then digs into GitHub for Windows, or rather Phil's efforts to make GitHub generally more friendly for .NET developers. Lots of cool new features!